Unusual approach, the museum-memorial of Izieu, in the Ain, launched a call for witnesses to reconstruct the very first commemoration of the roundup of Jewish children, dated April 7, 1946. “We have just found an inhabitant of Isère who had come to play in the official fanfare, he was 10 years old at the time. Collective memory is alive, it is maintained every day. A seemingly anecdotal memory or document can reveal a lot. This ceremony gives us precious information ”, explains Dominique Vidaud, director of the Maison d’Izieu, inaugurated at the scene of the tragedy on April 24, 1994 by François Mitterrand. Since then, Izieu has become a politically sensitive site. After considering the reduction of a subsidy to the memorial, attracting strong condemnation, the president of the region, Laurent Wauquiez, planned to come there on April 6, three weeks after Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, his socialist opponent.
The idea for this public call came from a batch of unpublished photos, given last year by a photographer from Brittany, close to the family of Marie-Antoinette Cojean. With her boss, Pierre-Marcel Wiltzer, the one who was then secretary general of the sub-prefecture of Belley had actively participated in the installation of Jewish children fleeing the Nazi threat, by providing furniture, blankets, food tickets. In the photos taken by Marie-Antoinette Cojean on the day of the first commemoration, the memorial team noticed the presence of a camera among the crowd. Hence the idea of going to search the Gaumont news archives …
A founding commemoration
Good pick ! A thirty-four second streak was found last year with the film company. Seventy-five years after its shooting, the film shows the animated faces of this immense crowd, grave and collected around the last refuge of the children, arrested on April 6, 1944 by the Gestapo of Lyon, commanded by Klaus Barbie, deported and exterminated in Auschwitz -Birkenau.
Other photos were brought to the memorial a few days ago by a former local official of the Scout Association des Eclaireurs de France, who kept an album of that day. Here again, the images confirm the magnitude of this founding commemoration, in the presence of around 3,000 people. “It is confirmation that the children have not been forgotten. Of course, the work of Serge Klarsfeld was essential in retracing their journey and making Izieu the symbol of the 10,000 Jewish children deported from France, but the foundations of memory were laid very early ”, Dominique Vidaud analysis.
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